Barry Driscoll

The painter and sculptor Barry Driscoll, who has died of cancer aged 79, was one of Britain's finest wild life artists and he was also a humanist, humourist, atheist, anarchist, hedonist, raconteur and bon viveur. In 1964 the quality of his work caught the eye of the author Henry Williamson, who invited Barry to illustrate a limited and new edition of his classic Tarka the Otter.

Although Williamson was a difficult, cantankerous man, of notoriously right-wing views, and naturally opposed to Barry's socialist sympathies, he became one of Barry's heroes. The writer inspired and encouraged him to develop his career as a wildlife artist. Barry subsequently illustrated many books with Desmond Morris, who regarded Barry as one of the finest wildlife artists in the world.

In 1960 Barry painted three large murals in the London Zoo. A year later he illustrated the inaugural brochure for the World Wildlife Fund. By the mid-1960s Barry's work was appearing regularly in the national press, and he had his own Sunday Express wildlife column. In 1970 Time-Life commissioned him to do a series of paintings of fauna in Arizona, while his mural of British cattle breeds for the Moscow Trade Fair in the 1980s inspired his 1990 design for Post Office stamps.

Barry thrived on discussions with a polemic edge. He was passionately involved in a variety of interests and rarely without a glass in his hand. He was also a keen observer of nature, and an artist whose skills managed to combine the broad sweep of his subject with an eye for exceptionally fine detail and a remarkable feeling of mood and character. An early painting of a ram with a bird perched on its back, remained one of his favourites. A much admired 1973 picture of a snowy owl, painted in gouache and watercolour, and a series of studies of domestic cattle, were monumental in conception and masterly in execution.

Born in Camberwell, south London, Barry was one of four sons of a printer on the Daily Express - his brother Ray was to become a printer as well, and his brother Bill became a journalist. During the second world war the family moved to Shropshire where, as a fugitive from the local school, Barry roamed the countryside and began making sketches from nature. He was a keen reader, and in particular cherished Gilbert White's Natural History of Selborne. Birdwatching became a lifelong preoccupation, as was his inclination to leftwing politics, formed when he fell in with a young anarchist on the run from the law because he had "borrowed" a bicycle. At school-leaving age they landed up in Soho, which became Barry's natural habitat, to which he always returned.

Barry was conscripted into the army, and served as a subaltern in India where, in the North West Frontier province, he somehow "lost" the convoy of which he was in charge, and was severely reprimanded. He later served in Palestine, in Egypt, and in Northern Ireland.

In 1948 Barry enrolled at St Martin's School of Art, on an ex-serviceman's grant, and on graduating with a national diploma in design won a place at the Royal College of Art. After graduating he married Kiffi Bowerley, a fellow St Martin's student, and he launched himself on a career as an illustrator, which stretched on into the 1970s and included many national press campaigns - including one for the then mighty GEC in 1962 for which I was the copywriter.

By 1982 Barry's emergent interest in sculpture was going hand in hand with painting, and the technique of working in a three-dimensional medium came as a revelation. He declared that sculpture was easy when compared with painting. He rapidly developed a fluidity of style, combined with a Stubbsian eye for anatomical correctness. Above all, his subjects were invested with a powerful character.

From the 1980s into the new century Barry made many trips to Italy to oversee his sculptures, forged by the Mariani foundry at Pietrasanta. The marriage in 2001 of his son Falcon to Sabina Coppola, underscored his love of Italy, sustained by spaghetti alla vongole and glasses of grappa. Barry was often seduced from the artistic and domestic straight and narrow by the Byronic inclinations and emotions of the true romantic. He lived for the moment. Wine, good food and lively conversation (delivered in resonant tones), often prevailed over the stern discipline of art as commerce, for he was clubbable, gregarious and sociable.

Public recognition came with a series of exhibitions, the last in 2002 in the Accademia Nazionale d'Arte Antica e Moderna in Turin. Barry's final work was, echoing the painted bird of 1973, a bronze of an owl. "I've had a wonderful life," he said, a few days before he died.

Barry is survived by his former wife Kiffi (they divorced in 1979), their daughter Pippa and son Falcon, and by his partner Leila Kouros. Barry and Kiffi's eldest son, Guy, died in 1995.

· Barrington Lionel Driscoll, painter and sculptor, born December 15 1926; died April 30 2006.